Issue 781 of the Sea-Intelligence Sunday Spotlight reveals a striking level of network specialisation between the alliances on the Asia‑Europe and Transpacific trades. Rather than competing head‑to‑head by offering identical direct port combinations, the carrier alliances are structurally segregating their networks to create unique commercial opportunities.
The data from Figure 1 illustrates that overlapping direct port-pairs are remarkably limited on Asia‑Europe. While 65% of direct port-pairs see no overlap, only 21% of unique port-pairs are shared by two carrier alliance networks. Furthermore, just 9% of the port pairs are served by three alliances, and a mere 5% receive connections from all four alliance networks. This heavily segregated environment indicates that carrier alliances are purposefully designing highly specialised direct networks to differentiate their commercial products, avoiding a fully commoditised market where everyone offers the same routing. (....)